Some Kind of Paradise

I am a Floridian. Some Kind of Paradise, by Mark Derr, almost makes me happy about that. But it also makes me far too sad to really claim any joy.

I have not always claimed to be a Floridian. When I went to college and introduced myself, I disclaimed any attachment to the state where I'd spent over half my life. Instead I said I merely lived there, but was really from someplace else. I had at that point no intention of returning.

That I'd spent half my life in the state and still couldn't call it home is pretty remarkable. More remarkable is the change I experienced in my attitude to Florida over just the next few years. I studied the state. I examined it in several ways, it's development and politics particularly. I became interested in it. But most importantly, I suppose I missed it.

It's hard to understand why. I don't especially like it there. Winters in Florida are wonderful, of course, and autumn isn't bad (though that season is best experienced in the southern Appalachians). I love the afternoon thunderstorms in the summer, but the heat and humidity serve to chase me indoors most summer days and I can't set foot outside in the spring for the pollen. The state is a huge mass of sprawl; even small communities far from major urban centers smear across the landscape like seagull droppings on wet sand. The major urban centers themselves are choked with traffic, unfriendly to pedestrians, and generally high in crime. Our schools are lousy. Our politicians are among the most ridiculous in the country. Frankly, to my mind, there's very little to recommend the place. Once I finally moved away, when I went to college, I was glad to be rid of the place.

And it was only once rid of the place that I started to appreciate it. Perhaps that's not the right word, appreciate. Instead I developed a morbid fascination with it, an attachment I couldn't fully explain and didn't expect. I moved back to the state, voluntarily, and stayed for two years. When I again had a chance to leave, with the Air Force, I managed to move first to a city only 20 miles from the state line, and although I ultimately made it halfway across the continent I moved right back to Florida the first chance I got.

And now that I'm thinking about leaving again, as I do every few years, I find myself inexplicably drawn to stay. For it isn't Florida itself that I love. It's the idea of Florida, an idea that loom large in Some Kind of Paradise.

I'm a practicing cynic, especially about the environment and double especially about Florida. I shouldn't have any sense of idealism about my home; the place is doomed. I don't think Florida can save itself and I don't believe any of the ten million people who will move there in the next 20 years know it needs to be saved. If they did, they wouldn't move in, but they don't care or don't understand what's wrong with the place. They are responding not to Florida as it is, but Florida as they want it to be.

And that, my friends, is the truth of Florida: she is a temptress. She calls to me as surely as the sirens did to Ulysses, as surely as she called to Ponce de Leon and Pánfilo de Narváez with tales of riches and a fountain of youth, as surely as she calls every summer to millions of Disneyfied tourists, as surely as she does to the thousand people who move in every day. Florida is most attractive to us when we're nowhere near her, when all we can here is the beautiful song, the eternal, unyielding sales pitch: "This is paradise."

It's some kind of Paradise, all right, but not the sort theologians and supplicants imagine. In truth I don't suppose Florida has ever lived up to expectations. The natives were violent and uninterested in welcoming white explorers—who did plenty to foster the natives' antipathy. Even upon settling the place and beginning to tame it, the Spanish found Florida devoid of the riches they sought, and the Fountain of Youth passed into myth.

The state's early settlers found a place of unmitigated difficulty, with fierce wildlife, poor soils, and resources that, though valuable at one time or another, were difficult to extract profitably. The climate kept out all but the hardiest souls until the state was finally tamed by railroads and the dream of transcontinental travel, and of winter retreats, became reality. Even then the state was never paradise for more than a handful of wealthy part-time residents; the vast majority of the state's population struggled to survive in a harsh and unyielding environment.

Parts of the state remained untamed until man in his infinite wisdom decided that Lake Okeechobee and the rivers that drained it, particularly the Everglades, were obstacles to be surmounted—or in this case to be dredged. Thousands were enticed to come to Florida to the most fertile land on Earth, to a place where one had only to cast seeds upon the ground and watch crops of all manner grow in rich soil without a hand to tend them. This fantasy died a quick death when the Everglades muck turned out to be nigh infertile without constant infusions of nutrients, but the name "Florida" had made its way into the national consciousness as a place where untold wealth might be had.

Very soon land speculators began to carve the state up into townsites and developments, and everyone was offered a chance to own a piece of paradise. This boom lasted only a few years before it collapsed, preceding the national Great Depression by three years and leaving hundreds of land promoters and other scoundrels penniless and thousands more people stuck with deeds to worthless, undeveloped and often unusable land.

And what of today? What is it about my Florida that keeps calling me, that keeps calling thousands of families a week to pull up stakes and move south? It's still paradise, but in an altogether different form. I guess the truth is, I no longer understand it. I've spent most of my life in paradise, and I don't like it. If this is Paradise, I'll be damned.

This is a wonderful book. It falls short in some ways, soars in others, but it has the siren song at its core, and anyone who's heard it knows it will always echo in their heart and mind.

So Many Books

It occurs to me that there are several books over there on the right that I have not reviewed. Before they get any farther down the list I thought I’d give them each a quick review.

I'll starting with V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. This is the comic book series (graphic novel, if you prefer; this format is a collection of several comic books into a book-length narrative) on which the recent movie (that I dearly loved) was based, and of course I was intrigued and wanted to read the comic. It’s pretty darn good. It’s also pretty darn different from the movie in a number of ways, not least the fact that V, in the book, is very much an anarchist, rather than simply a liberator of a captive populace, although the regime against which he’s fighting is equally oppressive. Most of the key events from the book made it into the movie. V is an altogether more difficult character in the book, though, a more complex protagonist. I enjoyed this but unless you are a comic book fan or a fan of the movie it’s probably not worth your time.

Next up, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m not going to review this book because you should already know what it’s about, and that it’s very good. And if you haven’t read it I will track you down and make you do so; ask Smittygirl if you don’t believe me.

Then we have Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, which I picked up a while ago in the bookstore on a whim. I really enjoyed reading this book, but it wasn’t an easy read. No book that encourages you to ask questions about where you’ve been, to search for patterns in your life and identify the myriad ways you’ve been reacting to your life the way you did when you were a child. FMSHL argues that we react to most events in life based on the way we saw the world as children, and we have to learn to break away from our habits and our childhood understanding to really live as adults. The book is targeted at the midlife-crisis crowd, but I found that much of the book had a lot to say to me.
Frankly, this book deserves a longer review and some discussion. It’s not the sort of thing I can recommend without knowing whether you need to read it or not. But I found it a thoroughly engrossing read.

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson, was outstanding. It’s my favorite of Bryson’s books, at least of the books I’ve read. Any outdoorsy person should read it, especially if you’ve ever considered hiking any part of the Appalachian Trail. I’ve hiked on perhaps as much as a mile of AT over the course of my life and probably will never attempt any significant stretch of it, mainly because as Bryson points out much of the trail is not especially scenic and there are lots of other scenic hiking trails to go on. But you have to admire what the man attempted to do, and this book is a fascinating and at times hilarious read. This one’s very highly recommended.


Basket Case is one of Carl Hiaasen’s more recent novels, and he’s as funny and entertaining and off-the-wall as ever. Hiaasen is my favorite Florida crime author by a wide margin (a club that includes John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Tim Dorsey, Randy Wayne White, and a few others) and this book is in keeping with my expectations. But there’s an upsetting difference between this and nearly every one of Hiaasen’s earlier books (apart from Stormy Weather): this one doesn’t take place in the real world. Hiaasen skewers south Florida most effectively when his characters operate in a real city; Basket Case, though it manages a good satire of south Florida, is weaker for taking place in some ill-defined mythical town.

The Sir Apropos of Nothing series was a lot of fun. You can read reviews of the Peter David series from the esteemed Lucky Bob here, here, and here. On his recommendation I decided to bring the series out to Africa with me to read. I’m glad I did. I don’t usually read fantasy literature. Actually, apart from Harry Potter, I don’t read any fantasy literature at all. I’ve never even read The Lord of Rings trilogy (although I did enjoy the movies). You have to wonder about a person whose introduction to an entire genre of literature comes from a series of books that satirize the genre. I like to think the eponymous hero of the series would rather appreciate that.
I’m not likely to start reading fantasy literature any time soon. I don’t dislike it, it’s just not my thing. But this was an excellent series, and I went through the books pretty quickly. They are all quite funny, though I think the first book is funniest because it’s newest. The third book might have had the most laugh-out-loud moments, though, in particular the exchange about Ho, and Who Ho is. Had a good laugh at that; actually, had to go look up the whole Who’s on First routine for another good laugh.

These books were more than just simple fantasy, though, because the protagonist is quite the introspective fellow at times, and we are treated to some very interesting viewpoints on the notion of heroics and chivalry and fate, and when Apropos descends to darkness it’s not hard to see just about any of us doing the same thing. Absolute power indeed.
This was a fun series of books, and while as I said I’m not going to start reading a bunch of fantasy novels now, I would encourage anyone who wants something unique and humorous that’s not completely throw-away to give these books a look. You'll certainly enjoy yourself. As for me, I'm sort of hoping the adventures of Apropos aren't yet over.

Pattern Recognition

I finished reading a book. It feels like it's been a while since I did that; I guess it has been about three weeks.


Since the book I'd been expecting to read was still in transit to me when I finished the last one, I borrowed one from the library here. The library has lots of romance novels, and crime novels, and spy thrillers, and military thrillers. None of which I'm much interested in. But I happened to spy a book by William Gibson, he of Neuromancer, called Pattern Recognition, which I decided to pick up and read.

I had to go back and reread my review of Neuromancer, because I liked Pattern Recognition somewhat and wondered what was different, since I recall not liking the earlier book as much.

I think in large measure Neuromancer suffers from my tendency to compare it to Snow Crash, which was written later but is, as far as I'm concerned, far superior in most respects. That and characterization was lousy.

That was not the case with Pattern Recognition. The book is helped by having a cast of characters whose motivations are much more clearly understood than those in Neuromancer; I found it much easier to care about Cayce Pollard than I ever did about Case or Molly.

I still have trouble with some aspect of Gibson's place descriptions. I don't mean to say his setting descriptions, which are nothing if not evocative; I mean his description of geographic space, of the relation of one neighborhood or place to another. I don't know what it is and I don't know how to describe it; it may just be me, or it may be something genuinely odd about Gibson's writing. In either case it's unsettling.

I don't have much of a review. It's Gibson's first "present day" work, which is interesting, but moreso to his fans than to the rest of us. It has been criticized for its frequent "tangential interruptions," to quote one reviewer, which surprises me because Neuromancer was the same way. I guess when Gibson goes off on a tangent about a near-future world of his own creation that's okay, but when he does so about the present world it's a tiresome interruption. I don't understand why that would be so and frankly like the fact that the story wanders a bit. Life wanders a bit, and Gibson's wanderings are interesting.

There are some conceits here; the protagonist is a little... unusual. She has some quirks I guarantee you've never imagined before, and that can take some getting used to. I suppose Gibson likes characters who are a little off the scale; in this case all of them are. If you can get past that, this is an enjoyable read.

Books For Thought

A meme thing of sorts, from the lovely and talented Ayzair:

1. One book that changed your life?

I don’t know its title. I don’t know that it was ever finished, much less published. I only ever read one chapter of it. But it was a book, being written by my best friend, Richard Osborne, in the 8th grade. I went over to his house for a party. Might have been his birthday party, actually. I think I spent the night. It was an interesting night. In any event, Richard had the pages of the book he was writing tacked up on his wall. I scanned them. It would have fit in with the “potboiler” style of crime or mystery novels, or at least it seemed that way to me. The protagonist was assaulted, I don’t recall by whom, on his way home from a restaurant. Could have been a scene from a noir novel. The hero managed to flick a toothpick at one of the bad guys and have it spear the guy through the palm. That’s one hell of a toothpick-flick.
In any event, after reading over the pages tacked to Rick’s wall I decided that didn’t seem so hard and I could probably write a book.
And so I did.
I’ve written three, now, although only the most recent one is publishing material. Still, if I hadn’t read Rick’s book, hanging there on the wall of his room, I may never have bothered trying to write my own. And then where would I be?

2. One book you have read more than once?

I’ve read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash at least four times, and it’s my second-favorite book. I’ve read most of P.J. O’Rourke’s books multiple times, including Parliament of Whores about a dozen. The first book I read multiple times was Beasts in my Belfry, by Gerald Durrell, which I probably read for the first time when I was eight.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Well, Keller’s Outdoor Survival Guide comes readily to mind, although the book is geared towards surviving in a large temperate wilderness, not on a finite desert island. I think what I’d want most is a large book full of blank pages, and a pencil. And a knife, to sharpen the pencil.

4. One book that made you laugh?

Many books have made me laugh, but I’ll pimp my favorite book, Straight Man, by Richard Russo.

5. One book that made you cry?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t; it’s not that I don’t cry often, it’s that I can’t think of a book that made me do so. Probably We Were Soldiers Once, And Young, by Hal Moore.

6. One book you wish had been written?

The Infallible Tell-tale Signs Given Off By People When They’re Lying

7. One book you wish had never been written?

Probably could have saved a lot of trouble if Das Kapital, and the ideas therein, had remained forever locked in Karl Marx’s skull.

8. One book you are currently reading?
Some Kind of Paradise, by Mark Derr, which is a history of Florida that focuses to some degree on the impact of human habitation on the state’s ecology. I don’t find a lot of time to read it or I’d be done with it already, because it’s enjoyable and well written.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

Many many dozens of books could be listed here. I’ll go with The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, in a tie with a book I need to reread, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

10. Now tag five people.

Actually I don’t know five people with blogs who haven’t already been tagged, so I’m only going to tag two: Lucky Bob, and Malda laire. If she even reads this…

Straight Man

I've been going through life for quite some time thinking Snow Crash was my favorite novel, and I've read it enough times that I need to purchase a new copy. Among the top several I've long included Straight Man by Richard Russo, which I picked up again on Friday because after the wretched disappointment of Charlotte Simmons I wanted to read something very good.

So it is an amusing coincidence that after this second read, Straight Man has replaced Snow Crash at the top of my list of favorites, and I need to purchase new copies of both.

The first several pages of my copy of Straight Man are now forever affixed to one another with two-ton epoxy. The chair for which I bought the epoxy remains broken and probably needs to be replaced. The sequence of events that brought this about were absurd, but of course anyone who knows me would have been able to predict what would happen as soon as I cut open the tube. At least the cat didn't step in it, which had been my biggest fear going in.

Anyway. Why do I like this book so much? Is it just a case of comparison against a very bad book? I don't think so; on Saturday morning I reread The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for the umpteenth time after watching the movie, so I had a good book in between Charlotte and this one. I think it's something more.

For starters, Richard Russo has a gift for marrying melancholy with farce that no other writer I know of can match. It's not enough simply to have a melancholy scene followed by a funny one; at the heart of Russo's funniest moments is a touch of sadness, a feeling that the characters know exactly what they're doing and that it won't end well, but can't stop themselves nonetheless. Fatalism is a very melancholy attitude. And, too, some of the saddest and most affecting moments in this book coexist with an ironic humor born of the characters' ability to step back and see their lives for what they are—no matter how much it may seem that fate has intervened, that something was inevitable, there is always the knowledge that in fact it isn't fate at all, that every moment is put in place by some earlier action.

We should all be so gifted as to see—or even have shown to us—the chain of choices that bring us to our greatest sadness or greatest joy. But we aren't. This is what literature gives us.

In thinking about the contrast between Straight Man and Charlotte Simmons I was struck by how few times—exactly once—in this book I felt a character did or said something that didn't connect, didn't make any sense. Comparatively I was constantly jarred by the bizarre characterizations in Charlotte Simmons. I couldn't even what it was that bothered me in this book, when I went to find it just now. It must not have been important.

And I like that. That's good writing. The fact that the book is an uproarious scream and a sad introspection at the same time is good writing, and entertaining, too. That our narrator, Hank Devereaux, is undergoing a midlife crisis so easily recognizeable to things in my own life just makes the story better.

I can't wait to go buy a new copy and read it all over again.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

As you may recall, I had been greatly enjoying Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons when I put it down earlier this year to take up other reading. And so when I picked it up again after finishing A History of the Middle East it was with great expectation and excitement.

But I can't recommend this book—which, considering that I actually recommended A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa, should come as something of a surprise. Tom Wolfe has been—and I suppose still remains—one of my favorite writers, certainly one of my favorite novelists (along with T.C. Boyle and Richard Russo). Thus, unfortunately, when I don’t like one of his books it’s rather like the betrayal of a lover, instead of just a lousy read.


I won’t go back on what I said earlier. The beginning of this book is almost scary good. Wolfe got so much right it should make any writer feel like a hack for even trying. But then it starts to get… to get… to get…

Well, actually, once the introductions are all complete the book starts to get really interesting. What Wolfe is great at is taking a group of characters who have no earthly business being in the same story, and throwing them all together. He's given us an interesting cast in this story, and by the middle of the book you're getting jumpy, eager to see how he's going to weave them all together and what miracles he will show you along the way.

But by this time, a few things have really started to irritate you. Wolfe has selected two particular aspects of college life and harped on them so mercilessly they become a cliché before the story itself is even half over:

1. College students fuck a lot.
Wow. I mean, great, great insight, that. Truly deserving of a place in the pantheon of profundity. How much research did he have to do to uncover that little gem? A casual glance at MySpace? In fact, he bases the entire thesis of this book (yes, Wolfe's novels do indeed theses, and I only wish I was good enough that mine did, too) on a study that indicates that even rational non-sexaholics placed in a highly sexually charged atmosphere will turn into raging hornytoads. Too bad he made up said study.

I disagree with this entire thesis. I'm extremely smart. I went to college. A lot of the students at the college I went to fucked around a lot. I didn't turn into a drooling lust-crazed poonchaser within one semester of my arrival there. Nor, surprisingly, did any of my friends—at least, not that they're letting on. I can warrant that people less self-assured or intellectual than myself might have, but young Charlotte Simmons is if anything far more self-assured and intellectual. That she would be so swept away rang a bit hollow for me.

And, of course, I cannot fail to point out Wolfe's continual repetition of the theme: college students fuck a lot. (Sorry for the profanity, but it's Wolfe's choice of word, and, frankly, all of our other euphemisms for the act—even the word "sex" itself—are too soft-edged to be accurate descriptors.) On virtually every page is some reference to the theme. Even on pages that consist of conversations between three adults, there will be some reference to the quantity of rumpus the students engage in. And of course, there's Wolfe's favorite phrase: "rutrutrutrutrut." It was comical the first time, amusing the second, and mildly interesting the third. By the fourth it was simply repetitive. By the time Christmas break finally rolled around, two-thirds of the way through the book, I was sick of it, wanted to cross it out with a Sharpie every time it was written. Find a new fucking metaphor, Tom!

2. Boys in college work out.
This actually rates higher than the previous insight, though that isn't saying much. In fact at first I was quite impressed with some of the comments Wolfe makes—muscles are just like any other thing you put on your body as a fashion statement. How true. How insightful. How many times will I have to read it in the course of this novel? Let's try to keep it under a hundred, if possible.

It's a fair point to make, certainly—when I went to college a mere (dare I admit it?) certain number of years ago, this trend had not yet fully developed, but is certainly the case now. Muscles are in (though only for men, thankfully). Abs are probably the highest altar of this particular religion, at least at the moment, but muscle in general is now fashionable. Hey, good for Madison Avenue! They've given us a trend that isn't unhealthy! How long do you think it'll be before women get one? Never? Probably.

Of course, the reason muscles are in now—and this is my insight, not Tom Wolfe's—is because most fashion designers are homosexual, and most gay men like muscles. I mean, if you gotta have models around, might as well be models you find attractive, right? (I maintain this is why so many female supermodels are so creepy; gay men don't really know what straight men want. The same is true in reverse, of course, but in reverse it doesn't result in mass anorexia, or in even very attractive women claiming they need to go on diets. Give me curves, dammit!)

Apart from the endless repetition of this theme—and I do mean endless, I hadn't even reached the halfway point when I wanted to phone Tom up and yell at him for saying the same thing on every one of the first 300 pages—there is the problem of grotesque exaggeration. I may not be immersed in a college campus at present, but there is one just three blocks away, and I drive by the gym there on my commute home from work twice a week when I take the toll road. The guys walking into and out of said gym are of decidedly average physique, and good for them. We ought all to be satisfied with as much.

I also visit another campus upon (too rare an) occasion. The last time I was up at Clemson I actually paid a great deal of attention to this while walking around the campus (Lord knows it was hard, because there were also women around, and it was spring, and they were in bikinis on the lawn, and… well anyway, Tom never managed to mention the glory of Spring). I can report that at my alma mater at least the guys are not as Tom Wolfe describes them. Every time he describes a guy it is with greater superlatives than the last time. By the time he gets to talking about the lacrosse players, the descriptions read like Lou Ferrigno at his peak. I know lacrosse players. They don't look like that.

Across the bay in St. Petersburg there's a modeling outfit called "All-American Guys." The guys they use are the "epitome of sculpted muscularity" without being hideous steroidal freaks (though I doubt they require urine tests). There was an article about the company in one of the competing tabloid-style papers here last week. Not a one of the guys pictured was even remotely as big as Tom Wolfe wants us to think virtually every guy on the DuPont campus is. The truth is, if even 1% of guys on college campuses looked like the All-American Guys, you wouldn't be able to swing a genuine Dungeons & Dragons quarterstaff around on campus without damaging a promising young model's career. In fact, if you hadn't noticed, the obesity epidemic has not bypassed college campuses.

Ultimately, with this topic the exaggeration might not have been as irritating without the constant repetition—then again, it might have been. Certainly the repetition wore quite thin.


Lest you think me shallow, I don't base my opinion of this book on these two minor, if highly irritating, problems. Repetition unto itself, however, does bog the book down in numerous other ways. Adam Gellin lusts for Charlotte Simmons. Good for him! She's pretty and smart. She's exactly the kind of girl I'd lust after if I couldn't be brought up on charges for doing so. But how many times do we need to cut away to Adam thinking about how he lusts after Charlotte before we get the idea? Two, three dozen? I don't know, it seems a bit much.

And then… and then there's Charlotte's depression. For well over a hundred pages, Wolfe gives us Charlotte Simmons, the depressed freshman (which would make her a "depreshman," a word I just made up that I rather like). Charlotte depressed lying in her dorm room. Charlotte depressed and hiding from the world in the library. Charlotte depressed riding back to campus after the formal. Charlotte depressed trying to avoid talking to her friends. Charlotte depressed at home for the Christmas holiday. Charlotte depressed and wailing for Adam to comfort her.

Hey, guess what? Charlotte's depressed! I assume at some point Wolfe has suffered from it himself, he described it so accurately: How you just want to be alone. How much you really, really hate talking to people. How answering questions is the most miserable thing you can imagine, except for all the other things you'll imagine in a minute if everyone would just let you be. God, I knew exactly what he was writing. I could have written it myself. It was so very familiar. And so… tedious. My God man, I wanted to throw the book in the trash before she even got home for the pain of Christmas break. I knew exactly what was going to happen, what everyone was going to say, how Charlotte would respond… I wanted to scream! I wanted to cry out, "enough already, Tom!! I freaking get it! Let's move on!" Was there anything else to this story? Did I even care any more? Charlotte kept hoping an angel would come steal her away, and frankly, I wouldn't have minded one bit. The other characters were all—every last one of them, even the ones you're supposed to hate—more intriguing by this point, and what's more if Charlotte really had caught the last train for the coast it would have made the rest of the book that much more interesting.

I skimmed about fifty pages. I don't skim, in novels, it's just not right. If it's bad enough to make me skim, I'm about one minute from donating it to the library unfinished. I put down Martin Dressler because it was so tedious I was skimming. I did the same with Scorched Earth. And dadgumit I very nearly did the same with this book—this book by a writer I idolize, this first book he's published in half a decade and which I've been looking forward to for so long—I almost put the damn thing down and started reading something else.

I decided not to. I got up, washed the dishes, fed the cat, and went to bed. I picked it up this afternoon and slogged it out, and it did get better. Once the various characters and their plot threads all began to race together toward their tidy conclusion, the book started to move. But by this point there were fewer than a hundred pages left—less than a seventh of the novel—and all the brilliant insights and interesting moments that had occurred in the first 500 pages—and there were many, like the definition of cool, or the nature of male humiliation—had been forgotten. By this point I was reading simply to finish the thing.

And I did.

And it ended… it ended well, in many ways, and not as well in others. The villain ends up broken, as all villains must. The exact nature of his brokenness is, of course, left to the imagination, as it should be, as Wolfe always does. (There is a reason I so enjoy his work.) Charlotte ends up with the right person, not with either of the wrong people. The right person ends up like Colossus astride the harbor, as he should. The little man ends up making his own way in the world, as he should. It all ends so terribly well.

But how did he get there? I overuse the phrase deus ex machina, but… I want to use it again. The timing, the nature of it all. The setup, such as it is, comes a whopping four pages before the actual climax, in the same narrative stream. Four pages. In a book over 700 pages long, the setup to the climax is first introduced four pages prior. There is a weak element of foreshadowing some hundred pages prior, but after rereading I still don't find it an adequate setup for the animosity that solves the climax.

Lord knows I've written myself into corners before from which there seemed little escape. That sometimes happens when you let your characters take over your story (as you should) and they end up not doing what you wanted them to, the sotty little ingrates. Still, I'm not Tom Wolfe. I can get away with that on first draft, but I try to correct it.

I suppose it can be viewed as a "surprise," an element that should amuse the reader, and perhaps had I been holding a more charitable view of the novel prior to the climax that might have happened. But no. I had just slogged through 700 pages of the exact same witty observations repeated ad nauseum til long after after all the wit had been wrung therefrom.

Yes, Wolfe tackled a big world here. Yes, he got a lot of it right. If you wish, read the first two or three hundred pages and savor the wit and insight. Then put it down and move on to something more interesting. If you bother finishing this book, you'll only end up disappointed.

Goodnight, Nebraska

Earlier I mentioned that I had picked up a book that completely drew me in after just a few pages. That book was Goodnight, Nebraska, by Tom McNeal.

The first 70-some pages of this book were incredible. I didn't want to put the thing down. McNeal's descriptive powers are outstanding and his characters, particularly his protagonist, was consistently believable and intriguing.

And then the book started to drag a little. The middle part of the narrative, which takes place in the eponymous town in the Nebraska Panhandle (the town seems to approximately replace Hay Springs, if any of you are curious and in posession of a good Nebraska map (and why would you be?)), drags a bit. In large part this is because the story turns into more a series of vignettes, and the focus on the protagonist is lost--he becomes just one of the few hundred people who call Goodnight home.

By the end, though, you realize what that means. The other residents of Goodnight, in fact, the town itself, are just as important as Randall Hunsacker. This is both a benefit and a drawback, since after about 100 pages the plot becomes unmoored and drifts around the sumptuous landscape of western Nebraska. In one sense it's the location itself that gets the best treatment in this novel.

Still, while I bogged down a bit chasing the plot, I enjoyed the story and appreciated it more after it had ended. In a large sense, the episodic nature of the story helps push the real theme, namely the repetitive and seemingly directionless nature of small town life. Most, if not all, of McNeal's characters are leading lives of (sometimes not so) quiet desperation, outwardly cheery while inside wrought with loneliness, boredom, and an unfulfilled yearning to break free and find out what else life has to offer.

Three Books

I've finished three books recently without reviewing them, and I should rectify that oversight.

First was Undestanding Arabs, which I picked up back when I thought I'd be in Iraq right now instead of whiling away the hours at work desperately waiting for something interesting to happen. It was the first of the pre-Iraq books I decided to read, and as such is also the only one I've finished so far. I can say safely even without having finished/read the other books, this is the one of the four that I would have brought with me overseas.

Obviously this isn't the sort of book you're just going to pick up and read for fun. But if you find yourself heading toward that part of the world, this book (now available in a new edition from September 2005) is basically the standard (not to say only) text on Arab culture written for Westerners. It's a great primer on dealing with Arabs on a personal level. Would that I had reason to use it.

Next up was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick. This is the novel upon which the movie Blade Runner was (loosely) based. It's a nice slim book and I took it with me during the fantastic trip to Valdosta a couple weeks ago. I read the whole book in one afternoon and another evening. I need to rent Blade Runner now and watch it again, but the differences in the two are significant.

This was a great book. I won't insult you with a synopsis since if you're reading this blog you are almost certainly well-read and well-screened enough to know how the story goes, from one source or another. If you only know the movie, and you liked the movie, you ought to pick this up. It's so much deeper, but typical of Dick it showcases a very ambiguous morality. I can't recommend this book too strongly to fans of sci-fi or dystopian fiction, though I'll admit non-fans would find many of the book's conceits a little to bizarre. Still, this is probably the best novel I've read in the past year.

And just today I finished Bill Bryson's Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. I picked this one up to take home last weekend because I wanted something ligther than the history of the middle east to read. Today I read the last two-thirds of it. Bryson is terrifically readable, funny and light and, for such a recent discovery of mine, one of my current favorites among writers. After Mother Tongue, I was really looking forward to this.

And it was light and engaging and humorous and a little sad, but it wasn't as great a read as I'd hoped--mostly because I couldn't get past Bryson's condescension toward so many of the people he met. Certainly not everyone you meet is as wise or warm or witty as yourself, but neither is everyone necessarily less so because they come from a different region or speak with a different accent. For an American, even one who when this was written had been living in England for over 12 years, Bryson comes across almost a little bit too Euro-trash, and that was disappointing.

Nonetheless, he makes some brilliant comments, especially considering that they're now over 15 years old. In particular he seems disappointed that every town in America is becoming the same--they're all Anytown U.S.A. He is disturbed by the tendency of the towns immediately abutting National Parks to become seedy tourist traps and is fairly negative toward tourist traps in general. He has some very insightful comments about the NPS' administration of the National Parks, which he sees as quite poor.

The book has been compared to Travels with Charley and Blue Highways. Not having read Blue Highways I don't know how to compare it, and Charley is almost 45 years old, so some of the insights show their age (plus I don't like poodles. Or Steinbeck). But before I started this blog, I read a book by Stephen Coonts called The Cannibal Queen. Coonts is no Steinbeck (or Least-Moon or even Bryson, frankly), but his book is perhaps the most recent version of the schlepping-through-America genre that started with de Tocqueville (who's book is still the best of the type), and to be honest with you, I like Queen better than Lost Continent. A 1941 Stearman is way cooler than any Chevette ever made, and Coonts manages to be less critical of the places he visits, possibly because as a former military man he has an easier time than Bryson looking past America's faults. While I chide this tendency in my colleagues, in print it's a much more attractive tendency than Bryson's condescension.

The Areas of My Expertise

Smitty's super-short review of John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise:

Why didn't I think of that?

And how in the hell did he think of all that?

Buy this book. Read it on the john, because you're going to laugh a lot. Really hard. And if you actually read every one of the 700 hobo names, write and tell me. That's a lot of hobo names.

No, seriously, this was really absurdly funny, and it was just the sort of thing I needed to be able to read during this period of intense and often confusing turmoil in my life. Thank you, Melinda.

Collapse

Jared Diamond’s Collapse is a long book. But societal collapse may not take a very long time at all. An interesting juxtaposition.


Let me start out by saying that this is an outstanding book. It has a handful of minor faults, most of which are of curious nature and not worth discussing (Mongolia is neither politically nor environmentally in danger of collapse; I assume he meant Nigeria, which has many of the same letters). That a book of this size and scope should have but a handful of minor faults is remarkable, and were I to write a full review of this book it would be almost entirely positive.

But time is short these days. It feels like it always is; and that’s why it took me so long to finish this book, which I started in October. Time is the one resource we must almost deplete at a constant rate, and there’s nothing at all we can do about that.

So I’ll keep this review short. What will you get if you buy this book? In the first few chapters, you’ll learn a great deal about the collapse of several ancient societies (and no, Rome is not one of them; Visigoths are not an environmental issue). These stories present lots of interesting questions and will keep you thinking long after you’ve put the book down.

Next you’ll read several chapters about collapses in more modern societies, and about the environmental problems facing certain places and how those are causing societal changes. This is an important point: Diamond is surely an environmentalist in some sense and he is surely writing from that perspective, but he is not writing about what is happening to the environment in these places (Australia, China, Rwanda) simply because the environment is pretty and full of fluffy woodland creatures; this is a deficiency of many environmentalists, the notion that we should care about the environment for the environment’s sake. What Diamond has done is show us, both in the previous chapters about ancient societies and in the ones about the present day, is that environmental degradation creates significant impacts on human society, so significant as to result in that society’s ultimate destruction.

Taking these two sections together, Diamond is showing us how societies themselves affect the environment, and how the effects those societies themselves had on their environment led to their downfall—or, in some cases, how those societies recognized and solved their environmental problems to their own benefit. This isn’t Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. Diamond is no breathless idealist. He’s simply using empirical evidence to show how societal mismanagement of the environment has significant, and often negative, impacts on society itself.

The final chapters of the book relate more general ideas about the environment and society, such as how on Earth could the Easter Islanders have been so stupid as to cut down all their trees. Diamond examines how societies fail to perceive, to understand, and to solve environmental problems. He discusses how major players in any society, be they tribal chieftains or corporate CEOs, have looked at environmental issues.

The final chapter of Collapse summarizes what Diamond sees as the largest environmental problems currently affecting society, how they are interconnected, and how they can be solved. He doesn’t propose solutions, he simply points out that all of the problems can, in fact, be solved by modern world society. But it will take sustained political will. And a part of that sustained will must come from us First Worlders, in the form of embracing a lifestyle that involves less consumption. Less consumption frequently is translated to "lower standard of living," but this need not necessarily be the case. Diamond does not get into this but I'm thinking about it and will probably post on it later.

I would love to discuss this book at length with anyone who is interested in doing so. But I must leave this review here. In summary, this is an outstanding book, one that deserves to be read by everyone. One reviewer called it "the most important book of the decade," and he may not be far off. You owe it to yourself and your children to read it. My only fear is that most Americans will likely turn their backs to Diamond's message. Jared Diamond calls himself a "cautious optimist" about the future. I hope he's right.

Arnold's Cyclopedia

I got yet another book from my local library! You should see what your library has to offer.

I checked this book out because A) I wanted some new exercises to do in the gym and the book lists pretty much every way you can lift a weight, and B) it costs like fifty bucks to buy a copy and weighs about nine pounds. My bookshelves are overloaded as it is and my checkbook is a bit underweight.

I did not read this whole book. Nor did I plan to. Nor would I bother. If you want a history of bodybuilding, it's in the book. If you want an entire workout plan for years, it's in the book. Every exercise ever conceived? In the book. Tips on competition? Yeah, it's in the book. I read the exercises. I have a few comments for those who might care.

This is the revised second edition of this book. It still offers a few exercises you should never, ever do (behind the neck chinups), but it also presents more alternatives. And, the discussion of squats and deadlifts goes much further into safety and why it's so important to keep the back straight. That's a good change.

The exercise plans are fairly absurd. Work out six times a week, hitting each body part three times? Fine, if you're on steroids. Anyone else will overtrain in a heartbeat. Then it gets better, with a plan for two workouts a day six days a week. Again, poor advice for non-roided types.
Of course, I'm not planning on using any of the workout plans in the book. I've done enough work on my own to know what works for me and I'm happy with that (although I'm less happy with the fact that I went to the gym all of once in November, and maybe four times in December). And after all, what should I have expected from a professional bodybuilder/governor (though probably not governor anymore by this time next year)?

All in all, this is a book with many ideas, only about half of which are probably crap. This is pretty good as books of ideas go. Most philosophers probably get to about 50%, if they're lucky. I'm sure my writings don't crack the 50% crap level. Marx never got anywhere near it. And, if you need to glue two things together, you can set this book on top of them.

Bartleby the Scrivener

So, I read Bartleby the Scrivener, part of this book here called The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville. I checked this book out of my local library.

If I had more time I'd probably read the other shorter novels of Herman Melville, but as it is I've been busy and I only checked this out to read Bartleby. I did this on the advice of a friend, but I no longer know how the subject came up. To be honest, I'm not sure I got Bartleby. Was there something to get? Or was I just looking for something more than was there. I guess this was just absurdism, and as such, it was an interesting read. Though I would have to argue with a few points. The coda wherein it is supposed that Bartleby worked in the dead letter office really seemed to destroy the mood. I don't know. I liked the idea of Bartleby just being impossible to figure.

That said, I like the way he controlled his situation. I'd like to see something similar happen in reality, to see how it would play out. How long could you get away with simply prefering not to do things? I'd prefer not to go to work, but I don't think I'd quite manage that as successfully as Bartleby controlled his boss.

It was interesting. And short, which is nice, since the books remaining on my reading list are both very long and have taken me a long time to read.